Rythan's Tech Commentaries

Sunday, February 19, 2006

coComment is now open to all.

coComment has now opened the doors to everyone as invitations are no longer required.

But what is it? coComment is a unique way of keeping track of all the comments you make on all the blogs you visit. Sometimes you just get lost on where you last made comments. With a simple Bookmarklet that works in Firefox, Internet Explorer, Safari and Opera, you simply add the bookmarklet to your favourites/links toolbar and then write your comment. Then hit the bookmarklet, then, finally, submit your comment as normal.

coComment will then track the comments for you in that section. There is also two additional tool you can use. The first is a little bit of javascript that you can put on your own blog that displays your comments -- I have one on this blog on the right. Second, there is an RSS feed available that you can put into your aggregator.

It works with most major Blogging sites with more planned. My only suggestion is that they make deals with these sites so that the coComment code could be integrated so that the use of a bookmarklet would no longer be needed.

This is all still in beta, but it does show promise in making it easier to keep track of all those comments floating around the Internet.

Thursday, February 16, 2006

Opera 9 Build 8219

Opera has long been a browser with some innovative features. They were the first to come up with tabbed browsing (that I recall) Now they are stepping up the ante with weekly tester builds which can be found at the Opera Desktop Team site.

I have been trying Opera on and off since version 5. One of the biggest holdbacks, of course, was that you was shareware. Then they came up with the ad-supported free version (blech). Finally, they went with a totally free version.

This sparked my interest. (What can I say, I'm not rich.)

However even still, there were issues that kept me from adopting Opera -- such as the ability to use WYSIWYG (What You See is What You Get) or rich text blog editors such as TinyMCE. They did not work in Opera. With the upcoming version 9, this has been addressed. (Update: Apparently I must stand corrected as The Blogger WYSIWYG editor still does not work.)

A big change is the introduction of widgets. Now this feature has good points and bad points depending if widgets are you thing or not. The nice part is, if you don't like widgets, then you don't need to use them. Check out their widget page to find out more about them.

There are dozens of changes and improvements to Opera and if Firefox keeps giving me issues, I may just permanently switch :)

Win a Trip by using Qumana v3b1?

Testing Qumana v3b1

After being in contact with the author of Qumana, Ianiv Schweber, I have begun testing Qumana. So far there has been issues with setting up my blogs as documented below. Since then, I have managed to setup my blogs but have had other issues.

My first attempts at publishing to this blog failed. The next day, I tried republishing and it did publish, but without the title. (I erased that post.) Subsequent attempts to publish returned a cryptic "Method not supported by Blog" error. Ianiv has stated that he will be working on better error messages in a future release.

With Ianiv being prompt with responses (something I always appreciate in a developer) I am looking forward to new bug fixed releases. Most importantly the issues of publishing to Blogger based blogs must be addressed, but I have every confidence that all issues will be addressed.

Friday, February 10, 2006

Beta 3 of Qumana is just that - a beta.

I just downloaded Beta 1 of Version 3 of Qumana. I was hoping for a cool tool for accessing my various small blogs.

It has potential, but this clearly is a beta. Unfortunately attempts to connect to my Blogger based blog on blogspot fails the auto-detection and manual setup fails with an HTTP Error 405. :( I suspect that they will be rectifying this and I will revisit their software at a laeter date. Either that or it just is being difficult today.

I will uninstall v3b1 and try their stable v2 and see if it has similar issues. For more information: